


Kaleidoscope

by rabiosareads



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Loneliness, POV Second Person, References to Depression, ambiguously set in between ca: civil war, excessive use of italitcs SORRY, i wanna hold him and tell him everything will be okay!!, tw: brief mentions of gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:47:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24141577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabiosareads/pseuds/rabiosareads
Summary: i fearno fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i wantno world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meantand whatever a sun will always sing is you- [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in)] by e.e. cummings
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Original Female Character(s), James "Bucky" Barnes/Reader
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Kaleidoscope

Sometimes your face would burst through his vision at sporadic moments. It depended on what he was feeling on that particular day and how bad it got. At times it would come in bubbles, dancing along his peripheral vision and blurring in the sun’s rays. Or maybe it would be in flashes, like a photograph, catching hints of the curl in your hair or the curve of your smile. His favorite would be in steady images, picked from his personal memory bank, scrolling through the mental photo album he kept close to him while he tried to sleep. Every night he would snap his eyes shut, focusing away from the slow throbs of his head, pursuing through sinking sand to see you. Only you, a sweet swell of his heart, a glistening wave in the ocean, plucking its diamonds along the shore. He marveled at the fact that your mere existence kept those nightmares at bay, the ones that would burn through his healed wounds and claw at his throat. 

Every morning it got a bit more tougher to wake up without you next to him. He tried to spread his heat across the sheets, to at least mimic what you left behind, but he was met with the coldness of his vibranium arm. It made his mouth slick with vomit. It made him almost cry, threatening to unravel who he used to be with great anguish. He had to push it away every morning, shove the pictures back into his photo album, and re-piece himself the next day. And every night, when the city lights were the only thing staring back at him and his insomnia consumed what was left of his sanity, he relieved it as if it was the first night.

He had no idea where you were. He was afraid to find out, frankly. Were you in the arms of someone else? Did you move on after he pushed you away? Or were you the same as him, reaching out to the heavens and wishing that the pillow next to you wasn’t as frigid? Steve remained tight lipped at your whereabouts. He kept saying it was for the best, it was meant to protect you.

But who better to protect you than the one who loved you most?

You left behind a smoke grey sweater on his kitchen seat and he refused to move it. He would catch a whiff of it when he would pick something up from the floor, eyes and jaw clenched for the crash, but the car never came. The expectation of you kept him on edge. Between that, the permanent dent in his bed and his racing mind, there was no rest. The pendulum kept swinging at his demise.

He set himself in a routine, something to at least normalize his existence. It was as follows: wake up, tea (he gulped it with slick disgust, he only did it because you told him coffee would trigger his anxiety), farmer’s market, sightseeing, reading, bed. Rinse and repeat every day until… who knows when. Every now and then slivers of loneliness would sneak its way in, a reminder in his aching joints, but a singing bird or laughing child would push that back. Reminders of life, its continuance. A small peace offering to his internal dispute.

He sat at the edge of his makeshift bed with his hand folded. His bare chest was winding down from another night terror and his hair was sticking to his face from cold sweats. He looked up at the cracked ceiling, letting the flashes hit him without shame. Screams screeching against the wall, drowning out with waves of physical pain, the occasional flash of cherry red blood against concrete. Snapped bones, white snow, the cold steel biting bruised skin. The crude image of slashed throats and tundra plains. 

_ "Longing.” “rusted." "furnace.”  _

His teeth grinded into each other. His spine erected and he felt the dig of his arm into healed flesh, the rush of blood to the panicked wound.

_ “Daybreak." "Seventeen." "Benign."  _

The door was open for him to escape but he never got up. He felt obligated to let the message finish. It’s what he was made to do.

_ “Nine. "Homecoming” -- _

Your voice embraced his shaking body and grounded him. He relished in its heavy demeanor, your eyes still shut at the time with sleep. You constricted your arms around his bare chest, creating crescent moons into his skin, rocking him awake as he shook violently from the terror he was experiencing. He snapped to reality at the sound of your alertness, kissing the conch of his ear, reassuring that he was still James Buchanan Barnes and that you were you. The simplicity grounded him, for now at least, sinking into the heat of your collective skin.

His finger trailed up the spine of his moleskin next to him. You gave it to him as an effort into normalcy. The spine was warped and peeling, the layers of pleather bubbling from its owner’s twists. The sickly beige color was wearing out from simple weathering, bleeding colors that resembled the way you enjoyed your coffee, the letters on the pages bleeding with splotches of ink, tears and sweat. The words that were sprawled on the pages were growing heavy in his pocket, dragging his legs up sharp hills, scraping his knees and leaving him raw with exposed bone. You told him to write his dreams, nightmares, triggers of lost memory and even his grocery list. He would lie through gritted teeth that he didn’t even have a pen, to which you would whip out of your pocket with quick wit, him admiring your care and aching as well. 

_ “I hear that if you write what’s on your mind it improves your memory. Try that out.” _

You had your own, just to have him mimic. He hadn’t remembered his childhood yet but the lingering infantile edge was still there with your simple reminders. That was what he was, he thought, a bubbling mess of words and pain, hands stretched out for you to pick up his pieces and figure it out yourself. You haven’t lived decades like he has. You haven’t experienced the unsullied and forgotten moments in his life, like spending your last quarter at Coney Island or taking that last twirl with the girl in the powder blue dress. You had no idea who James Barnes was, let alone Bucky, even less than the surface of who the Winter Soldier was. 

Yet you were there, cutting yourself on every edge, smiling like a sunbeam through the emptiness of space. How foolish.

His fingers flipped through the page, flashes of black ink whipping past, before his thumb stopped on a folded crease. He found himself going back to this indented page, sinking his thumb into the same groove. He tried to look away and not go back into the same torture he submitted to himself since you left, but he considered that it wasn’t as awful as he made it seem. How can it be when it’s about you?

Your handwriting was quick yet elegant to him. He studied the way you’d connect your y’s with your s’s and the looping in your p’s and o’s. At the end of your sentence, depending on the mood you were in, either ended in a barely noticeable period or a bleeding exclamation point. He would hear the echo in each syllable in his head, making sure to enunciate your pitch and depth of your whisper, letting his mental tongue curve the roof of his mouth. He had it down to the half laugh and warmth of your blushing cheek when you leaned into his scalp to read it, a blooming reverence spreading across his chest from your purity.

_ Remember: _

_ The day may change but the sky remains. _

_ The birds may fly away but they still sing the same song. _

_ The trees may lose their leaves in the fall but come back in the spring. _

_ These things may change but remain constant at the same time. Just like I am with you. _

The crack of your laugh split his head in half and left him raw. He took his mechanical arm, heavy and cold, and ran it through his hair, making sure to swirl his fingertips in his scalp. He didn’t dare use his flesh, he didn’t want to feel the warmth that lingered deep in his blood. 

_ These things may change but remain constant at the same time. Just like I am with you. _

He hadn’t noticed the wilted page breaking from the woven cloth spine. He hadn’t noticed the ripped corner that his thumb held the it together, he hadn’t noticed the blinding white light in his vision, nor the blistering throbbing in his temples, nor the heaviness on his tongue that dared to claw out and rip his vocal chords into shreds. His brain was smoothed over with that sentence, steam rolled into his  amygdala, mocking the obvious: you were not with him. You were no longer there. You left nothing but a sweater, words, and aching bones.

At that moment he had wished you never existed. That he didn’t notice on that spring day, a day when it was unusually hot, the stretch of your arms and the contour of your shoulders, fingers lacing through fists of hair to wrap around. That when you turned around the wind stopped blowing and the sound was nothing but a dull hum that rocked his spine back and forth, your eyes so alive and watery it made him tremble.  He bellowed to the mountains that he shouldn’t have found out you were also from the States, that you sat there patiently as he attempted to stream his thoughts together and that you stayed past dusk and dawn to lay in the pathetic excuse he had for a mattress. He wished he never let whatever phantom take over him and lift his legs, toes scraping the pavement, to you, his curse, allowing you and your mouth to burn holes in his skin.

He didn’t deserve what you were giving, a martyr to his sins, palms open with the bare fruit that his belly ached to fill up with. And you did it selfishly, without question! How foolish of you! Hot tears threatened the corners of his closed eyes but he swallowed them back, his wrists rolling.

_ “If you ever feel, you know, nervous or anxious, try to focus on something that’ll trigger a happy memory. For example, I love the smell of buttercream icing and sea salt because they remind me of when I was a kid. Try that.” _

So he did. He dropped the moleskin on his mattress, slipped on his clothes and shoes, and dragged himself out the door. He was surprised that he repressed the creeping panic that burned in his belly, swallowing the coals and letting it settle in his heavy footsteps down the stairs. Maybe you were right. Time to ground.

Bucharest was a neutral place to be, thankfully. You told him once at the cafe on the left side of him that Romania was a beautiful place to be in, especially in the warmer months. He looked up at the robin egg blue sky, not a cloud in sight, letting the heat radiate around the brim of his hat. He was warmer than usual beneath the hoodie and leather gloves but it was still comfortable with the occasional breeze. His hair curled at the edge of his jawline, hidden from the shadows. His mind was blank but his body led down the open path, to the right and up a small incline, straight into the farmer’s market.

It was busier than usual, which meant he would blend in with ease. Families gathered around a small stand for  Gogoși, swirls of vanilla and sweet oil permeating with the tang of fruit and earthiness of vegetables. Another reminder. The last time you had Gogoși you left a film of powdered sugar on your upper lip, frowning at his hidden chuckle.

_ “You have some left over,” he had said, picking up a napkin from the stand. _

_ “Maybe I wanted to save some for later?” you had suggested, leaning into his touch. _

His tongue grazed his top lip subconsciously, feeling foolish at the phantom action. He scanned a familiar fruit stand with the smiling attendant, her crow’s feet pulling down her green eyes. This round had a great selection of succulent fruit, such as sweet strawberries (your favorite), plump oranges and smooth bananas. He grinned at the woman, who suggested that he’d try the newest batch of green grapes that hung from a makeshift display.

_ “I read in a book somewhere that dark berries and fruits help with memory retention.” _

For the second time this week his hand grazed over the plums. They were bigger than usual and leaning more blue, his mouth gathering saliva over the thought of the taste. He gathered a few in his hand, letting the curve of the fruit dip in between his fingers and palm, pinching the flesh just like you taught him. He asked the woman with kind eyes if they were the same price, she confirmed, and he dropped four of them into her small bag.

He looked over the bananas, then the gooseberries, then to your favorite strawberries. The fresh red skin was deep and he found himself grinning again at the shiver of your gaping mouth, sinking down on the pinched flesh, your eyes closed with satisfaction. He wasn’t particularly fond of them but he gathered a few in his hand as well. 

Although he left his moleskin at his place he remembered that he wanted more bushels of lettuce and broccoli (“please don’t tell me your one of those adults that hate to eat their greens?” you laughed while holding his mechanical arm) so he turned around to follow the sea of green. He squinted to the sun, flexing his arm so carefully against the wooden stand.

“How much?”

His inside churned the wet cement that held his joints together. They hardened and constricted itself through each groove of his bones, bleeding into joints and finally into his brain. He knew it, he confirmed to himself, he had finally gone insane. His heart was riotous, screaming, absolutely bouncing in his rib cage to hit him in his Adam's apple with great force. Everything came to him and all at once, a quick death couldn’t even relieve him from the plethora of waves that crashed on his poor body.

Your hair danced with the breeze, carefully curling the ends, lifting in the air like a beckoning figure to his dumbfounded brain. He saw you in opaque reflections against the blinding light, bursts of neon supernovas that mirrored your soft and kind smile, fading in and out of dancing spots of strained vision. His body shot up with great adrenaline, a crazed rush of blood but the cement remained hard. 

It was like the first time all over again.

He blinked at you in Morse code, hoping that fate would grant him his begging posture, that you would turn around and see him at his worst and simply  _ come back.  _ He stood there, now vibrating with tension, waiting patiently. He could stand there for years until he was a collection of bones and dust, just for one chance for your gracing contact. Just one chance.

You shined your teeth at the same woman he was just at, pointing at the strawberries with a gentle prod. He watched you bloom into your nervous ticks, such as tucking a hair behind your ear and playing with the sleeves of your chickadee cardigan. He had taught you several Romanian phrases and you stumbled upon the taste of the pronunciation, letting your blush ring your ears every time he corrected you. What a wondrous memory.

Fate decided to loosen the grip on him and let him have a taste. You turned around, eyes focusing on the crowd, a small smile still stuck on top of your teeth. You looked eyes with him and immediately sank your shoulders. His breath hitched in his throat and that adrenaline finally broke him free to pick up his wobbling knees to you. You had no time to let the gathering of tears hit your cheeks, red hot and burning, hand picking up to meet his.

He grabbed your wrist and twisted it towards his body, pulling you through the crowd to cut through a line of alleyways. You saw nothing but streaks of reds, yellows, and beige, the air from your chest whipping out of you from his grip. Your senses rocked as soon as the sunlight was cut from clotheslines, cloth granting you a cooling shade. You focused on the ground, absolutely terrified to trail up, but the vice grip on your wrist told you to wake up.

Your eyes shook in your skull with violent restraint. It wasn’t until he let go, faltering against your hot skin that you were still alive, not dreaming, that everything that led up to this point was actually feasible. His fingers flexed in his gloves, the whirring of the vibranium beneath his layers, your eyes trailing up to his heaving chest. You could tell he was beginning to spiral again from the way his chest would rise fast and shudder quickly. 

Your mind refused to register the oasis dream once more when your eyes landed on his. Tears as hot as lava and twice as heavy fell down your face, a great force of wind choking your throat at the sight. His eyes, so sunken in and so tired, glassy from lack of sleep. The sharp dip of his nose to his cupid’s bow, sharp jaw scattered with a shadow, skin slightly pale from the lack of sunlight. But what broke you most were his eyes, the main focus of his broken soul. They told you his story, what longing he had for you after all this time, flames of anger and frustration licking the irises. You couldn’t stop the sobs that left your throat, hiccuping your bones.

“Bucky…”

Your voice, so sick with sweetness and unfiltered melancholy, punched him in the gut. There he was, unraveling at your very existence, letting his pride and strength peel off his skin like chipped paint. He buried his face into your hair, mouth open to groan out a terrible sigh at the smell, his fingers curling at every inch of you. You hadn’t noticed your body lifting from the ground yet you held on tight, afraid that God would fail you and let this man be only an apparition manifested from your desperation.

He felt more swollen and warm than last time. His muscles fit your body so well with such ease, you could live in every groove. His breath was hot against your ear, rocking you back and forth with gravity’s pull, gripping you tighter with every shattered breath you took. He was afraid to break you in half so he loosened up, still digging into your shoulder blades and hip bone. 

“Please tell me I’m awake.”

He said nothing. You were afraid of an answer, he felt it, but he confirmed with a small grunt, his fleshed hand gathering at the base of your neck. You weaved your fingers through his hair, knocking his hat off his head. You heard the fruits roll onto the pavement, shifting your weight so you wouldn’t step on the bruised fruit. You pulled back slightly, letting your hands travel with you to cradle his face. He leaned into your heat pathetically, his eyes closing at the warmth.

“Where did you go?” his voice was brittle and low, breaking at the end of his question. You rubbed his cheek with your thumb, sucking in the sweetness in his breath.

“I had to hide,” you confessed, voice equally as raw. “Steve said that they would be after me, that after he figured it out I could… be with you….”

The last half of her explanation tasted so bitter and cold. He let it build in him, uneven and teetering on spillage. He wondered if you knew what was happening, what could he say to reassure you that whatever  _ that  _ was, whatever was created in him wasn’t the same man that cradled your body and spread sweet nothings on your skin with his mouth.

“I wouldn’t let that happen to you. I wouldn’t let  _ anything  _ happen to you.”

“I know. Steve said it was also for you.”

The ocean he found himself in began to split in two once her lips graced his chin. He was pulling back internally but his body groaned and creaked from your next kiss, brushing angelic lips onto the button of his nose. He leaned in when another one pressed his eyelids, a prayer of sorts spilling inside of him, your lips finally puckering against his bottom lip. 

The ancient storm that was brewing in him scattered away with a shining light, like God’s hand through cumulonimbus clouds, his body leaning in to gather in the kiss. He held you there, his poor languished soul seeping into yours, finally satisfied to feel your skin again.

“At least this game of hide and seek is over,” you laughed into his lips, his tongue tasting your joy. “I have no choice but to go back home, hmm?”

He closed his fatigued eyes, his lips curling into the first genuine smile in weeks. You were right, home was unfortunately behind his brittle door and in his arms, your eyelashes kissing his scars as he held you. Once he had you in his embrace, his lips on yours so saccharine and tooth aching, he knew he couldn’t let it go again. Not for Steve, not for S.H.I.E.LD., not even for who he used to be. He whispered promises into your scalp and then into your tear stained cheeks, letting the salty tears saturate his tongue. 

Nothing else mattered. The aftershock howling outside their bodies. It didn’t matter to Bucky in the slightest. His tunnel vision expanded with you in his frame, Bucharest his new nirvana, backed up by the secrecy of this alleyway. 

**Author's Note:**

> I've been binging Marvel films, like I usual do and I was reminded of my soft spot for this man! I hope y'all enjoyed this in some sad yet soft way!


End file.
